


Common Responses

by PureBatWings



Category: Star Trek (2009), Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Bar Room Brawl, Coping with trauma, Delta Vega, Gen, Non-Linear Narrative, POV James T. Kirk, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Starfleet Academy, Starship Enterprise (Star Trek), Tarsus IV, Threats of Rape/Non-Con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 17:30:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13439715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PureBatWings/pseuds/PureBatWings
Summary: Common responses to traumatic or surprising situations include: Fight, flight, freezing, fainting and following. James T. Kirk experiences all of these.Usual legal disclaimers apply. Not my characters, not for money, no copyright infringement implied





	Common Responses

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LK who introduced me to the concepts of faint and follow](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=LK+who+introduced+me+to+the+concepts+of+faint+and+follow).



**Common Responses:**

Common responses to traumatic or surprising situations include: Fight, flight, freezing, fainting and following.

**Flight**

_Tarsus IV_

Jim looked around. The sudden silence after Governor Kodos’ pronouncement of his solution to the food crisis from the fungal infection was then broken by gasps, a few strangled cries of “No!” or cursed growls from the men in the crowd, their fists clenching in response to the bland statement that they were collateral damage, judged unworthy to live.  And then the eerie high-pitched sound of phasers gearing up from stun to kill mode from the Governor’s guards surrounding the crowd made Jim’s brain jump into warp. “Run!” he gasped at his aunt and cousin before he bolted for the nearest way out of the public square, fleeing in a zigzag pattern to make himself a harder target to hit.

He hid out at their farm a few days until it was clear they weren’t coming back. After that he lit out for the caves at the base of the hills a day’s walk from their farm, taking along anyone he could find on the way, hoping there was some safety in numbers. Honestly the adults he had found who came along weren’t that much help, two women and a man who was grazed in the leg by phaser fire who had played dead in the melee of the capital massacre. They walked, or in the guy’s case, limped, acting like zombies from seeing their families killed. They couldn’t or wouldn’t answer Jim’s questions about food stockpiles or good water sources in the foothills.

Most of the smaller kids were either crying or really quiet. Some of Jim’s aunt’s neighbors had left their younger kids at home when they went to the public gathering, thus sparing them the carnage. There were even two toddlers too little to walk any distance, so he made sling from his jacket for one and took his turn carrying the other kid with the two women. The guy’s leg couldn’t bear any weight and infection had killed him soon after.   Jim was nearly fifteen and small because of the famine, but no one older seemed to be doing much of anything, so he took charge. His neighbor Kevin was 11 and Jim’s right hand man.

From about three dozen people, they were nine when Starfleet finally showed up. It was an anticlimactic rescue, a beam-down of an away team, not a photo torpedo blowing away the bastard of a governor’s residence in a pyrotechnic finale.  Jim hoped it was one of his distress signals from hacked and reverse engineered communicators he had found on his supply runs that had helped, but by then he’d buried so many people, traded his body and sex with Kodos’ soldiers for food and medical supplies more times than he wanted to count, stolen and struggled and just, fuck it, kept going, that he no longer cared.  

_Delta Vega:_

Shit it was big, hungry and hairy, a red gaping maw with saber tooth fangs that clearly wanted Jim for lunch. Terror made him pour on the speed, heedless of the icy surface. He just couldn’t fall again, he had to reach the cave openings he saw ahead of him, to get in a place too small for this monster to nab him. Behind him the loping predator was suddenly grabbed by a huge red crab like creature with a tail and lots of legs. After it gulped down Hairy Predator with a few snarls, it decided Jim was also enough protein to make a good meal. He kept running, tumbled down a crevasse, rolling head over heels down an icy hill, followed by the top of the food chain creature. It chased him into the cave, wrapped its tongue around his ankle, then thigh, pulling him closer to his unenviable doom, until a blazing torch waved in its face by a humanoid creature forced it to surrender Jim’s leg and retreat into the icy wasteland.

**Following**

_Riverside, Iowa, Earth_

In some ways, it took years in foster homes, fighting, acing his classes while displaying a colossal I don’t give a damn attitude that kept people at a distance and then an epic and bad bar fight with five?  more? cadets beating the shit out of him followed by a pep talk from Captain Pike had goaded Jim into giving a damn and doing something with his life by joining Starfleet. It was at that point he started caring about something more than just his own survival and reacting to threats.

 _San Francisco, Earth_ :

Settling in with a new friend in Leonard McCoy and other people he was getting to know through classes and in less formal settings (namely, vertically in bars and horizontally, mostly in bed) Jim enjoyed the feeling of being part of something bigger than just himself, a group of people trying to do good in the universe. He could follow orders up to a point to make sure he could stay part of something this important, this vital. He didn’t blindly follow, he willingly gave his allegiance to the ideals of this organization.

Jim knew how bullies worked. He hated them on principle. They might be scared inside, but they menaced people into following them, into being their minions out of fear that they would be the next to get creamed.  That was the dark side of leadership, he decided, letting his thoughts wander to historical examples such as the Nazis in twentieth century Germany and the Sha’I’la dictatorship on Cre’l’k in the next century as a less-than-absorbing instructor at Starfleet Academy lectured about ethics and leadership. Jim was in the command track, so this was a required course.   The course content was too species-centric, he suspected.

Starfleet was getting more diverse, less dominated by humans hailing from Earth or its outposts—he had even noticed a Vulcan on campus the other day, sleek, silent and composed in an instructor’s black uniform, making his way towards the Hawking Science Building.

How would a human even instill loyalty in a Vulcan subordinate, he wondered idly. You’d have to be smart, or you would be utterly annihilated in the brains department. You would need to understand logic and applying hard data to situations even though a Captain’s answer also would need to take into account such qualitative factors as other beings’ feelings and cultural responses. Hmm, maybe examining providing compelling leadership to a crew of different species might be a good topic for his senior thesis…

**Freezing**

_Delta Vega_

He didn’t have words, hell, he could barely breathe. Then his autonomous body function kicked in and he stumbled away from the being from a parallel timeline who had upended his reality. He sucked in ragged breaths, reeling from all the information spinning in his brain that this old version of Spock had dumped with a mental meld involving fingers on his face and murmured Vulcan phrases that Jim half-understood. He wasn’t a card-carrying member of the Xenolinguistics club at the Academy just to pick up cute dates for the weekend.  

“Forgive me Jim, emotional transference is an effect of the mind meld,” apologized the older Vulcan.

His brain came back online. “So you do feel.” It was a statement, not a question. The implications were something he would have to think about later and what it meant for how he worked with Spock, when they had defeated Nero, if that time, no, when that time arrived. The wind howled in again through the cave’s entrance and Jim flinched at the feel of it on his bare head. Fuck, it was freezing here.

**Fight/ Faint**

_Riverside, Iowa, Earth_

For five seconds he thought he was actually winning and could take out the four security goons who had horned in on his pickup lines. Uhura was fine looking and sassy  with a comeback and judging from her drink order, she could really hold her liquor. All excellent qualities in Jim’s book. He could have talked her around to giving him her first name and com number if Cupcake and his buddies hadn’t muscled in on his barside flirtation, he was sure of it. But instead he had ended up at the wrong end of a punishing meaty fist doing its best to flatten his nose permanently.

A sharp noise cut through the pain as he sprawled over a table top and an older man, clearly a command officer, broke up the fist fight with a few terse commands.

“You can whistle really loud, you know that?” Jim slurred before passing out, his face pounding painfully in time with his heart beats.

 

_Vulcan’s Solar system_

It was so plain to him, how could Spock not see that he was wrong and Jim was right about how they needed to confront Nero, not go confab with the rest of the fleet. Spock ordered him taken into custody and Jim lashed out, decking the two security guards who grasped his elbows, shoving one down and starting to get the upper hand on the other one when he heard McCoy yelp, “Enough Jim!” before four Vulcan fingers clamped down on his shoulder. As he passed out, he heard the arctic Vulcan voice say, “Get him off the ship.”

 

_Earth's Solar System_

“You never loved her!”  Just a few more words and he would push Spock enough to break. He just hadn’t figured it would be so spectacular a fight with the Acting Captain as he ended up gasping over a console, his head swimming from lack of oxygen, black spots swarming and taking over his field of vision as he grew nearer to passing out and death.  Then suddenly he was more conscious, able to pull air in through his throttled throat once Spock had pried away his hand, and stunned at his own emotional outburst had removed himself from command and the bridge, leaving Jim in charge…


End file.
